Canada. Dept. of Finance. Treasury Board Secretariat : Constituted as a Committee of Cabinet by order-in -council in July 1867, the Treasury Board received its first secretary in January 1868 (P.C. 1868-264, 30 January 1868). After his appointment as Secretary to the Board, John Langton continued to serve as Auditor General, a senior post in the Department of Finance at the time, and he assumed the position of Deputy Minister of Finance as well while serving as Secretary. When he retired in 1878, the Deputy Minister of Finance became the ex-officio Secretary of the Treasury Board. In embryonic form, these formative arrangements established the basic link between the Treasury Board as a Committee of Cabinet with its supporting Secretariat and administrative head located in the Department of Finance, an institutional relationship that lasted until 1966. The inner logic of these administrative arrangements is clearer when it is remembered that the Treasury Board was originally constituted to facilitate the work of Cabinet in relation to financial matters delegated to it and that the Chairperson of the Treasury Board was the Minister of Finance.
Up to 1914, the Secretary to the Board performed a limited function as a one person administrative head to a Committee of Cabinet whose primary output were Minutes of decision. The Secretary coordinated the presentation of submissions, the recording and tracking of decisions and he managed the necessary direct correspondence with the Cabinet and departments at the level of Deputy Head. Apart from these very limited functions, there was no autonomous administrative activity on the part of the Secretary. As late as 1938, the establishment was made up of only eight persons. Activity beyond formal board meetings tended to be in the form of limited inquiries under Board auspices, often conducted by the Ministers who constituted the Board. The real activity of the Treasury Board in its early years was the limited delegation of decision-making power exercised by the Board itself.
While the appointment of a Secretary was a nominal step in defining the autonomy of the Treasury Board as a Committee of Cabinet, the role and status of the Secretariat was largely dependent on the legislative recognition of the Treasury Board itself as an autonomous entity. The autonomy of the Board was confirmed by a series of statutory recognitions, Orders-in-Council and established conventions between 1878 and 1914. As long, however, as the Board served primarily to relieve Cabinet from the demands of innumerable administrative details that still constitutionally required Governor-in-Council approval and as long as the board constituted a bastion of administrative orthodoxy that rigorously protected a regime of departmental financial autonomy and the ministerial prerogative, there was not much scope for the Secretariat to develop into a real administrative arm with distinct activities beyond clerical support performed by part time and seconded staff from the Department of Finance.
The chief administrative function of the tiny Secretariat as it evolved up to 1931 was liaison with Departments and the Auditor General about payments and accounts, and the assumption of responsibility for coordination of the expenditure estimates for presentation to Parliament each year. This responsibility arose logically from the role of the Treasury Board in supervision of government accounts but it was only very gradually that the Secretariat assumed anything more than a coordinating role in the presentation of estimates prepared with a high level of autonomy from the authority of individual departments. It is largely on the basis of this function of preparing the estimates that the office of Secretary to the Treasury Board evolved into a small administrative unit within the Department of Finance with a distinct set of administrative duties that increasingly marked an independent function.
The turning point for the Secretariat as a distinct entity in the administrative hierarchy were the administrative reforms of the financial administration of the Government of Canada beginning in 1931, (21-22 Geo. V, c 27). While only playing a nominal part in the new legislation, the Treasury Board Secretariat received a new set of administrative responsibilities in relation to the new office of the Comptroller of the Treasury which transformed its role in preparation of the estimates and the enforcement of financial control. From initiatives within the Department of Finance, the Treasury Board was increasingly assigned a pro-active role in regulating the financial, personnel and materiel resources of the Government of Canada. From that point on, the Secretariat evolved into a distinct administrative component of the Department of Finance, assuming the status of a separate division in 1948 (with approximately 35 employees), which administered procedures for regulating departmental activity in conformity with Treasury Board directives and policy. The Financial Administration Act of 1951 (FAA), 15-16 Geo. VI, c. 12, did not outwardly change the connection between the Board as a Committee of Cabinet and the Department of Finance as the location of its administrative arm, but that Act tacitly acknowledged the fundamental change that had taken place in the status of the Treasury Board Secretariat when it enlarged the legislative sphere of delegated authority conferred on the Board and provided that the Secretary of the Board was no longer ex officio the Deputy Minister of Finance but rather a senior officer of the Department of Finance. As head of the Treasury Board Division within the Department of Finance, R. B. Bryce now assumed the title of Secretary. In all but name he and his predecessors had been performing the role of an autonomous administrative head of the Secretariat on a delegated basis with the Status of Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance for years before the legislative acknowledgement.
Over the next dozen years, the Treasury Board Secretariat assumed the status of a multi-divisional Branch but acted as a virtually autonomous entity, administering a sphere of activity legislatively granted to a distinct Cabinet committee which ranked higher in the bureaucratic hierarchy than the Department of Finance per se. In 1966, this almost century old administrative connection between the Treasury Board and the Department of Finance was formally severed by the Government Organization Act, SC 1966-67, c 32, s 4.2, which conferred departmental status on the Treasury Board Secretariat and made the new minister responsible, the President of the Treasury Board, the Chairperson of the Board. Additional legislation conferred upon the new Department of Government and the Board a large extension in mandate, roles and responsibilities.
